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Sales is about making connections. When you reach out to people with a solution, whether it’s analytics software, a carpet-cleaning service, or a new brand of vegetable juice, it’s the connection that matters first.

And that connection is made with a smile, a “hello”, and a handshake. Something you can’t do when making connections online.

Until now. Online presentations are a tool that puts your face right in front of people. Stephanie Grant uses online presentations to help Abel-Womack’s sales executives make connections with people, ultimately to increase sales.

Yes, we also had to memorize the periodic table and calculate equations, and yes, we’d sometimes wonder when we were ever going to use these scientific concepts.

Waters Corporation has been putting science to good use for more than fifty years. They’re a leading maker of analytical instruments for measuring fluids and substances used in healthcare delivery, environmental management, food safety, and water quality.

So it’s a good thing the people at Waters paid attention in science class. If you eat food, fuel your car, or use medicine, equipment from Waters probably had a role in ensuring the safety and effectiveness of the products you use.

Would you guess that their internal learning programs are a little, shall we say, involved?

I’m not sure this even qualifies as a problem. Maybe it’s a “First-world problem”, but here it is: How can we create great content without sitting at a computer?

What kind of innovations exist out there to help us multi-task? Can we use voice-to-text, mobile tablets, or specialized headgear to develop content that people will love?

Turning Thoughts Into Words

Here are some of the technologies that, believe it or not, we’ll all be using in the near future to create content:

Voice to Text Apps: You’ve heard of voice notes, where you make a recording of your random thoughts when you’re not in a position to type, like when you’re out on a morning jog. The idea is that those thoughts are going to be worthwhile enough to transcribe later (provided these aren’t thoughts recorded at two in the morning while watching the Cartoon Network).

And of course, why transcribe? Isn’t word-recognition technology able to record directly to text? For phones and tablets, there are numerous voice-to-text applications. Maybe that guy in the car next to you isn’t ranting at the radio or muttering conspiracy theories, but writing a post for his sports blog. You can even have Apple’s Siri Eyes Free installed in your car.

One major glitch: Voice to Text apps don’t make driving any safer, according to a recent study by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. It turns out that looking away from the road isn’t the only distraction; it’s thinking.

But Glass and devices like it (like Vuzix) still have some obstacles to overcome, such as pricing and concerns over privacy. Store and restaurant owners are already deciding whether to allow the headworn futuristic things into their establishments, and there’s no doubt some litigation and legislation to follow. I believe that, like tablets and smartphones, they’ll attract a limited stratum of superuser. Then once someone discovers the killer application, we’ll all wonder how we survived without them.

Mobile Tablets: Naturally, the iPad, Android, Kindle (oh, and Microsoft Surface) tablets have changed the way people view content. First, they’re now more likely to browse while watching television, as well as carry the things into restaurants to amuse their fidgety children (guilty!). But there’s no reason they can’t be considered tremendous content-creation tools as well.

Tablets are fine for writing, but because of the tablet’s touchscreen, they lend themselves readily to graphics production and editing. Specialized tablet apps like Adobe’s Photoshop Touch, and something like Sketchbook Express let you edit photos and create graphics. And of course there’s a phalanx of apps that let you share them on the web pretty easily, even from a phone.

Don’t Leave Without Your Gloves: By now you’ve seen Minority Report, and while, like me, you probably can’t remember the story, I’ll bet you remember Tom Cruise’s computerized gloves. They were simply the interface for a gee-whiz transparent display, but they captured the imagination of tech geeks everywhere.

Shouldn’t it be possible, someday, to use gloves like this to interface with a computer or other type of screen, to create all kinds of content? You could type away at thin air and see the results directly on your Google Glass display while sitting on a beach.

People who create content are always looking for that spark, an inspiration, and that often happens to us while sitting at the ballgame, hiking a mountain peak, or using a playground slide. These technological marvels will let us continue to search for inspiration, and take advantage of it immediately.

It’s The Thought That Counts

So these devices may make it easier to multitask and create on the fly. But if thinking is the problem, as the Texas A&M study reveals, can you create great content while using a treadmill? Anyone can ingest news and other content on the overhead televisions at the gym, and many people read books on Kindles and (gasp) paper while working out, riding the train, walking the dog, and doing all sorts of other activities.

Can it work the other way around? Can you create compelling content while crushing calories? Or is mental focus as critical to creativity as it is to driving? Arguably, most people will probably create higher-quality content when they are sitting quietly and undisturbed.

But what about those brain flashes that hit you while you’re inspecting avocados in the produce aisle? For instance, I’ve written entire blog posts while strolling through a mall. That doesn’t change the essential rules about identifying an audience, using research, and calling for action. For that, whatever futuristic device I’m using better be connected to the internet.

But no matter how easy it is to create content on these awesome tools, let’s just keep them out of the car.

Distance Learning has been a buzzword for awhile. But I’m not talking about an educational method that goes back to 1996, or 1982.

In fact, distance education dates to 1728, when a Boston when a local educator began offering distance correspondence courses (by post or mail). The first correspondence degree was offered by the University of London in 1858.

So the innovators go back aways. They aren’t just the people we read about today, like Daphne Koller, Richard Saul Wurman, or Salman Khan, who are certainly innovators in their own right. But they are standing on the shoulders of people who long ago realized that students didn’t have to be present to learn.

And someday, somebody will stand on theirs. But what kind of learning innovations will they dream up?

What’s Next In Online Learning?

Let’s parse out some critical components of distance education on which the next ideas will be built on.

It will be flexible. If the fact that distance education began in the 18th century tells us anything, it’s that technology has little to do with it. The printing press, the postal system, the phone and fax machine, the internet, the social sites, mobile devices and virtual environments and devices like Google Glass shouldn’t matter. Any learning system should probably be built so that the next big thing doesn’t mean throwing the whole learning model out.

This means there should be a focus on the lightest footprint possible for a course, whether it means crowdsourced data, cloud storage and delivery, or use of a peer-to-peer network. The course should be available on many platforms without too much modification.

It will be enduring. Every item out there on the web is available to view and learn from. Many articles we find when gathering information may be several years old. That doesn’t mean they’re outdated. Despite advancements in healthcare, software, robotics, and other areas, many core principles remain stable. This could mean that the fundamentals of any curriculum area are easily translated to online learning, even years after the course was created.

So there is no need for an innovative course platform to emphasize a finite duration overall, only for the individual learners. As long as teachers are available, numerous courses can run for long periods of time and educate thousands of users in an asynchronous manner.

It will be measurable. Communication is critical in any kind of learning system, and a distance education makes it even more important. Besides having numerous ways to coordinate efforts between teachers, students, and other parties that have an interest in their education, an innovative course platform should include ways for the trainer or teacher to review feedback from students as well as monitor their progress. It should also give the students ways to see how they are doing over time, as well as see up-to-date responses from the teacher.

Some online learning tools emphasize one type of measurement system over another, largely based on which kind of technology is their bread and butter. Content-based platforms focus on viewership stats, while tools that are communications platforms at heart focus on statistics related to discussion. True learning tools will include that, while focusing on feedback and outcomes as a snapshot and over a time period.

It will be accessible. This word means many things. The learning tool should be easy enough to use that it doesn’t hinder the learning process, and it should be readily used by people who are disabled. It also means an innovative tool should not rely on one kind of device. If people are able to use technology they already own to take part in the course, that’s the best approach.

The accessibility of a learning tool puts a great emphasis on the design of the course platform. Even more than the user-experience design practices favored by website and e-commerce designers, a learning platform needs to make clear what students are supposed to do throughout the process, as well as allow teachers to create and modify their courses easily.

It will be visual. Whether that means users share a presence in video, animation, images, or graphics, making it easy for them to create ideas in a visual format will be paramount. Visible concepts are more readily grasped, and are more widely shared. Yet, most graphic design tools are still seen as the domain of professionals who specialize in their art. Infographic-building tools are on the rise, as well as visually-focused sharing platforms, and it’s no stretch to imagine that learning can take some pages from the social media and content marketing realms.

A learning tool should include a way to gather data and details and display it in an immediately-publishable visual image. Barring that, the tool should integrate with other graphics-development platforms that emphasize ease and share-ability.

Obviously, these rules don’t have to be taken as dogma. It’s possible that the next big advancement in distance learning will be built for one type of platform, be difficult to use, be almost unmeasurable and yet be wildly popular. Stranger things have happened. I believe the ideas that will endure over time will be those that follow at least a couple of these ground rules.

At some point, we’ll be reading about another innovation from a visionary building on the accomplishments of those who have captured our admiration today.

Last week I took my daughter to her first Red Sox game. We got there early, explored the ballpark, and enjoyed some Fenway Franks, peanuts and ice cream while we watched the first four innings. We left before the first rain delay of the 2013 season. This game was also a long-term milestone for the team, as it was their first non-sold-out game in ten years.

That’s disruption.

On the train ride to Boston’s North Station, I used a new payment system provided by the MBTA; mTicket, a mobile app that lets you buy your ticket and activate it when you board. I worried that it wouldn’t work, or that the T conductor had never heard of it, and we’d get tossed from the last car at a low speed. Instead, the app worked perfectly.

More disruption.

On the subway ride to the ballpark, we saw several people reading books on Kindles and other handheld devices. During the game, a lot of people took pictures with their phones, of the game, the players, and each other. I joined in the fun, and we’ve all seen Facebook friends posting pics of themselves at the game. People take mobile pics at rock concerts, too. It harkens back to the (circa 2004) obnoxious use of cell phones while sitting behind home plate.

All of that is disruption.

Innovative Disruption: The New Normal

Innovation has made it possible to disrupt one industry after another, from home delivery of groceries to genetic RNA interference. In the realm of education and training, Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, allow countless users to take part in university courses, which may be regular in-person courses or specialized for online learning.

Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen has led the discussion on disruptive innovation for years. His books have focused on new technologies and mechanisms that have changed companies, industries, and the world. We think of mobile devices and social websites as disruptive innovations, and they are; but it doesn’t have to be technology. Business methods and ideas can also turn the tables on how things are.

What makes a concept disruptive?

It’s important to note that disruptive technologies and ideas are nearly impossible to identify, except to visionaries. This is because they should be characterized not by what they are, but for what they aren’t:

They are not a reason for change: Brian Solis says that disruption is a catalyst for change, but not the reason. Look at the current content marketing trend, which is considered disruptive, but it emerged partly because of social media, which required a constant flow of new, original, branded and unbranded content. Similarly, tablets like the Apple Newton existed for decades, without a clear purpose, before Apple launched the iPad and changed everything.

They lack refinement: Often, new technologies have no single organization driving best practices. MySpace and Friendster began as an expanded version of online chat, and only now, with the emergence of the Facebook Timeline and Google Plus, are we beginning to see design dominance in online social platforms. Or are we? Pinterest is driving a completely different look for social sharing, and Facebook’s frequent updates still drive people nuts.

They lack performance analytics: Views, shares, likes, retweets, leads, opportunities, influence, and engagement…the list goes on. These terms are still fairly new, and it’s unclear which of these communications metrics actually mean much to a company’s bottom line. More importantly, how marketers can best manipulate these numbers remains a mystery, as does how they can readily use these metrics to drive true business impact.

They lack an audience: A disruptive innovation is usually a simple fix to a product that is meaningful only to a small group of people, the way content management systems began as a better way to store documents and share them with people across internal networks. It mattered only to IT managers. Today, a CMS like WordPress allows any web publisher to share just about anything with the whole world, using customized designs and access levels.

They lack an application: It’s usually easy to see something emerge, but be unable to imagine a use for it. Look at the iPad, which sold well at the outset but originally stymied people as to its best use. The complaints included “no keyboard”, “too big to be a phone”, and “too underpowered to run desktop applications”. That didn’t matter. Mobile apps and cloud technology combined drove the success of these platforms, and now people can browse, read, search, communicate, and view videos while watching TV, working in retail or healthcare, sitting at the beach, or riding the train.

In online media, whether it is for communications or social sharing, disruption is driving incredible changes in the way we do things. It’s already hard to imagine how we got by without Facebook, and five years from now we’ll wonder how we survived without something some software developer is creating right now.

Usability is more than just a buzzword. It’s the holy grail of web designers everywhere.

And it’s not just websites. Designers of operating systems, e-commerce sites, content management systems, online training tools, business intelligence systems, and social platforms always strive to make them more useful.

Usability means e-commerce sites that get found and help shoppers complete the sale. It means marketing automation tools that provide useful feedback for making sales and marketing decisions. It means interactive online games with intuitive controls that are easy to figure out.

It also means online presentation hosting platforms that make content easy to publish and share.